The advent of word processing software has made life easier for people who write and edit documents. In addition to making it easy to move and change the text of the document, some conventional word processing software programs have built-in features that automatically generate codes within the text so that the document can be automatically indexed via an "index" command. On the other hand, some conventional word processing software generates documents that are composed of several smaller documents. It is inconvenient to have to individually specify the indexing command for each of the smaller documents in order to index an entire document. For example, a set of manuals written for a new release of an operating system may include between three hundred and six hundred individual documents. Using conventional indexing software, the names of each of these documents would have to be typed in by hand.
In addition, the documents may be stored in various formats and versions generated by the word processing software. Consequently, some of the documents must be converted to a newer format or version before they can be indexed.